What You Need to Know about Selling to the C Suite

For some reason I've been invited to be a guest on a lot of podcasts lately by some very impressive and well known sales & marketing experts. I've enjoyed them all. So when Marcus Cauchi asked if he could interview me I said yes - even though (to my eternal shame) I'd never heard of him.

I have now. And wow!

I have never learned so much from a podcast in my life.

Along with some very deep and probing questions Marcus casually threw in so many gems of information he could easily be acquired by De Beers. I'd like to think I contributed a bit of value to the conversation but Marcus' contribution was outstanding - so much so that, as well as including a link to the hour long recording in the first comment I'm publishing the entire transcript here.

It's a long read - 12,380 words in fact - but if you're a sales leader or sales person and you read, absorb and acts upon you'll be rewarded a thousandfold. (And you can read it a lot quicker than you can listen to the podcast). Here it is.

If you enjoy it and find it valuable please "like" it (and if you have the time, share it) to encourage the LinkedIn algorithm Gods to share it far and wide. And if you have questions or comments I'll answer every single one and ask Marcus to chip in too.

PS The title is Marcus' not mine, but I rather like it.

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Marcus:               Hello and welcome back to The Inquisitive podcast. Today my guest is Steve Hall, who is a pommy with 40 years in Australia and he is the managing director of Executive Sales Coaching Australia and he is Australia's leading authority on C level sales. Steve, it's a pleasure to have you today, thank you for coming along.

Steve:                  Well hello and g'day.

Marcus:               Excellent. I can imagine you now with your hat with corks.

Steve:                  Yes, surprisingly, I was wearing a tie today. The first time for quite a long time. I was at an event so I thought I'd dress up.

Marcus:               Did they think you were there for an interview?

Steve:                  No, it was a Sales Leaders Forum event. I thought I'd put a tie on and I was the only person out of 60 people there wearing a tie.

Marcus:               You're a fashion leader.

Steve:                  Well, it's good to stand out.

Marcus:               Absolutely. Excellent. Steve, would you mind giving the audience a quick potted history of how you got to where you are?

Steve:                  Okay. I was fortunate that being very old, I was around in England in the days of free education, so the government kindly paid me to go to Bristol University and I repaid that by not going to lectures and basically chasing women, taking drugs and drinking beer but unfortunately I did it in reverse order, so I didn't catch many women.

Marcus:               You did chemistry, I think.

Steve:                  I did. But it was fairly irrelevant because I didn't go to that many lectures. I scraped a degree and then I spent eight years in Bristol basically having fun and not doing anything serious. When I was about 25, I thought I should get a proper job rather than bar jobs and labouring jobs and things like that. I applied for a job as a medical rep on the basis that a doctor friend of mind told me you get a company car. In those days, the interview process was something like, "Steve, do you have a degree?"; "Yes"; "Okay, you start next week."

Marcus:               I've had a few jobs like that.

Steve:                  So I spent three and a half years doing that and then I decided I'd come to Australia to make my money in the colonies for a year and here I am 40 years later. I moved into computers and went to IBM and sat their tests and they said, "You're quite bright. Can we see your visa?" And I said, "Visa?" And they said, "We don't take people here on holiday visas" so I went to Burroughs computers and they didn't think to ask.

So I joined them and then I met a girl and worked my way... I actually started as a sales person but I was absolutely terrible. I had no idea what I was doing and no one taught me and after six months, they said to me, "Steve, you're a crap salesman but you're reasonably bright, so do you want to move into support?"

Steve:                  So I moved into support and worked my way through being a project manager and a program manager and a professional services manager and then eventually I decided I was sick of fixing other people's problems and I'd rather make some problems for other people, so I did marketing for a while and then they kindly gave me a lot of money to go away.

At that stage, I'd just got married so I left, paid off a chunk of the mortgage and then I discovered that there's not a big market for a 42 year old ex-marketing managers, so I got a job selling ERP systems.

I didn't know what I was doing but I thought I'd learn, so I started reading and listening to tapes and researching how to become a salesperson and after a couple of years, the guy that hired me left and I took over as first of all national marketing manager and then international sales and marketing manager looking after sales and marketing throughout the world.

We ended up becoming the leading supplier of ERP software to publishers in the world and then that company got bought and I worked with the new company for a couple of years. I went to Paris as a global account manager and then I closed a very large deal there and then I resigned, came back to Australia and I've been working for myself ever since.

Marcus:               Fantastic. A wonderfully chequered journey. I suspect there's a lot of lessons that came from failure and self sabotage along the way. I'd like to explore that. I always find that scar tissue is fair and away the best teacher. You've obviously managed to create this position for yourself as the leading authority on C level sales. One of the things that I hear time and again from the C-suite is that their experience of salespeople is too frequently very poor and I think it starts in the foundational stages where salespeople really don't understand who their ideal customer is. I know this is a subject close to your heart. Do you mind telling me about the process that you go through when you're coaching your clients about understanding their marketplace?

Steve:                  Yeah, I think there's just two things there. One, it's certainly you need to know what your ideal customer looks like but you also need the ability at whatever level of sales you're in to understand the perspective of the customer, what they think rather than what you think they think. I've seen so many salespeople get in front of a senior executive and then just blurt out how great they are, "We're big and important and you should be happy to buy off us," and it just doesn't work. I was actually in a seminar event this morning with Tony Hughes and a few other people and Tony says that CEB did some research that said 85 percent of senior executives say that salespeople bring no value towards the conversation.

Marcus:               Most salespeople show up and throw out a quote and hope and sell and run. That's just a waste of everybody's time and resource.

Steve:                  Absolutely and the other thing you mentioned is knowing your ideal customer. When I first joined the ERP company that I mentioned, I knew nothing about sales. The guy that hired me was a great guy, still a friend and a client. He said, "I know we've got a great solution for two niches, consumer electronics and publishers but I want you to see if we can sell it to other people," so I started calling other distributors and we were only a small company. We were competing with the SAPs of the day, so back then the giants were JD Edwards and BPIX. Big American companies with lots of money and we had 15 people in the company.

We were never going to compete unless we had an edge and our edge was we were good at those two niches. And when I went talking to food distributors, they would say, "Have you got 'use by' dates?" And we'd say, "No, we can put them in there" and they'd say "why would we get you to put them in there when bigger companies have already got them?" And we'd go to car distributors and they'd say, "Can you handle a dealer network?" "No, we can't do that,"

And I'd go to different types of distributor and even though we provided distribution ERP, from the customer's perspective, we didn't give them what they wanted because they weren't just in distribution, they were in car distribution or food distribution or something else, so from their perspective, they weren't in that amorphous mass of "distributors", they were in a much narrower niche.

I went back to John and I said, "Look, why don't we just focus on what we're really good at?" So that's what we did and we created a couple of brands selling the same software, but two with different brands. Bookmaster for books and Powermaster for consumer electronics. We just focused on the fact that we really knew those industries and we were successful with both.

Marcus:               This is really interesting because what I'm seeing is the people that are growing fastest are nicheing very deep and they are sacrificing and giving up trying to please everybody and what I see time and time and time again are companies who try and please everybody and end up pleasing no one.

Steve:                  There's a story a long time ago now, 15, 20 years ago. We did a demonstration to a book publisher and our software was specifically for book publishers. We'd had a lot of particular modules that were aimed at them in addition to the... There was the accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, warehousing, inventory, etc. but we also had particular modules for subscriptions, for new title releases, for returns and things like that. It was very book specific and we spent a full day doing a demonstration to the managing director of this company and at the end of it, he said, "It's not bad but it's not really a trade publishing system, is it?" Because they were trade publishers and they made a distinction between trade and academic publishers. We ended up selling it to them and we ended up putting stuff in for them to make it more of a trade system but they didn't see themselves as just "publishers".

If you talk to the big software companies and look at their markets, they'd say, "Yeah, we're into media," and by media they mean publishing and newspapers and film and TV and cinema and everything. But these people didn't see themselves as being in media. They didn't even see themselves as being in book publishing. They saw themselves as trade publishers.

Marcus:               Again, if I look back, again I'm showing my age, you look at companies like Sun and Tandem and what they did, you had IBM with their PCs and their mainframes and Sun comes along with their minisystem and before IBM realized that Sun existed, they'd dominated that niche and you saw Tandem doing the same with parallel computing so they managed to corner that section of the market within financial services-

Steve:                  And DEC.

Marcus:               And DEC, yeah. Absolutely. So we've seen this pattern. The last 30, 40, 50 years but for some reason, people seem fixated on trying to add more rather than take stuff away and only focus on the stuff that makes the boat go faster.

Steve:                  It's sort of human nature. I mean, if you were a sales rep... I mean, I used to have this too when I started. If you're a sales rep, you want the biggest territory you can possibly get because you've got this illusion that your customers are going to come to you and if your territory's 10 times bigger then you've got 10 times more chance of customers coming to you - but it doesn't work that way.

So many people I've talked to and I've started by saying, "Tell me, who do you sell to?" And they say, "Well, we can sell to anyone," and I say, "That's great but you haven't got the resources to sell to anyone. Why don't you pick someone to sell to? If you can sell to anyone then pick people you're really good at and sell to them and forget the rest."

Marcus:               There is a fundamental rule in life that I've discovered, which is what you say no to matters more than what you say yes to.

Steve:                  Absolutely. Or rather "no".

Marcus:               Taking this to the next logical stage, in terms of doing your research prior to engaging with a C-suite executive, I'm curious, what process you advise people to go through to refine and define their message so that it's laser focused on the specific audience that you're trying to target?

Steve:                  That's a great question. First of all, you need to know your ideal customer profile or ideal customers' profile. There may be more than one, and because there's absolutely no point approaching someone that doesn't need what you sell... You can potentially sell ice creams to Eskimos but why would you if you could sell them to people in the desert? Hopefully my clients understand that but some of them don't, so I'll say to them, "If you can sell to anyone, pick someone." There's one company that approached me about 10 years ago now and they did the old story, "Once we get in front of the C level we're good at selling but we can't get in front of them."

So I said, "Okay, who do you sell to?" They were a digital agency. "Who do you sell to?" "Well, we can sell to anyone." "Okay, well who do you have credibility with where you understand the industry and you have customers?" "Oh, well we've done some work with retailers." So there were at least 100 retailers, as in retail groups in Australia that were big enough to need their services, so that was simply a question of asking them those questions. "Who are your customers now? Who've you got experience with? Who do you understand?" And that was more than enough for them to focus on because they didn't have the resources to focus on more than 100 companies.

Marcus:               In terms of developing the message, what are the aspects of a message that really matter the most to grab the attention? Because senior executives are surrounded by noise and lots of people want their time, although in fairness, the majority of salespeople are avoiding picking up the phone to them, what do you have to do to craft that message so it grabs their attention and it's personalized?

Steve:                  Well there are a couple of things. First of all you have to get the message to them in a format that they will digest. That depends, there's always talk about cold calling versus social selling but they're all just channels. The ways that you get the message to people are phone, email, LinkedIn, video, you send them a parcel with a shrunken head in it, you marry their daughter. I mean there's many different ways to get the message out and then as you said, what's the content of that message? I'm going to give you a really, really boring answer, which is, "it depends". It depends on what you're selling, it depends on who you're selling to but the components, first of all, who are they? Who is your target market, right? That's the first thing.

Then what do they really care about that you can help them with? Now again, this depends on the industry they're in because what trade publishers care about is a little bit different to what academic publishers care about and very, very different to what TV shows care about. So who are they? What do they care about? And from a perspective of that type of company, from a perspective of the industry and the niche they're in, and then what do they care about from the perspective of what's their role? In other words, what the CEO cares about is going to be somewhat different to what the CFO cares about, which will be different to what the CIO cares about.

Then the final thing is, bearing all of that in mind, what do they care about in terms of that specific company? Does that company have some challenges? You build your message based upon a combination of different factors. There's no one size fits all.

Marcus:               A couple of really useful tips I've learned along the way, if you're selling to public companies, look at their annual report and accounts.

Steve:                  Yes.

Marcus:               Section 1A is made up of all the blue sky fibs that the chief executive, chairman and CFO are peddling to their investors. Section 1B is made up of all the caveats as to why section 1A will not happen and if you can help them solve any of the problems in section 1B, that's the equivalent of giving them a knighthood and so that's a fantastic resource. The other thing you mentioned is, where are they in their lifecycle? Are they in start up? Are they in continuation where basically they've ironed out most of the creases, everything's going on level pegging? Are they in growth? Are they in turnaround? Are they in recovery? Because each of those stages of a company or a product or a market's lifecycle, bring with them a different set of pains and opportunities. Understand that.

Also understand where they are in their career. If, for example a C-suite executive is six months or less into his or her job, they're still in the honeymoon period, which means that they have to start coming up with some ideas in the next six months or else they will fail in that role and probably be out on their arse. If they are late in their time in a post, chances are they're either feathering their nest for their next move, or they're trying to write the history they want to be remembered for. So what's the legacy that they're aiming to leave behind? It's really important to understand how to position your message. Another platform that I love to use comes from some resilience training by, I think his name is Schmidt, Paul Schmidt on resilience. It's core. C-O-R-E. Control, ownership, reach and endurance. What do they control? What should they control? What do they want to control? What can't they control?

In terms of ownership, what is the responsibility that they have? Who owns the problem? Who owns the upside? Who owns the victory? Who owns the failure and will get blamed? Reach. What's the ripple effect? Drop a pebble in the pond, who else is going to be affected? Positively or negatively. If they're successful or if they fail. And endurance, it's how long have they had that problem for and how much longer are they willing to tolerate it? So again, I fundamentally believe that most of the value, particularly in top level, high value, high ticket sales and enterprise selling, is done away from the customer and away from the prospect, in the research phase. I don't believe that you can put in enough research. There is, however, an argument to make sure that you don't spend so much time getting ready to get ready that you miss the opportunity. So you need to be clear and use specific tools to help you identify when the iron is hot enough to strike. Any thoughts on that?

Steve:                  Well that's a lot to have thoughts on but yes I agree. I think one of the things I would add, although you've sort of covered it, is priorities. What's the priority right now? That comes back to the annual report and similar things. Or it can come back to what's happening in the outside environment. I mean, at the moment we have a royal commission into age care, which is throwing up all sorts of problems with age care homes. If you wanted to sell to an age care provider then you need to bear that in mind. If you can say, "Look we can help you in this current environment where the government's digging deeply into your practices," you've got a much better chance of getting their attention than if you try and sell them something that's not relevant. Equally I'm sure that if we went to Donald Trump and said, "Look we can make this Ukraine thing go away," he'd probably, you know, listen.

Marcus:               There's another platform that I recommend to my clients, which is a slight variant on Pesttle. P-E-S-T-T-L-E. Political, economic, social, times and timing, technological, legal and regulatory and environmental. When you start to explore in a senior executive's environment, using those platforms as points to question, what's the political landscape? What's the financial status of the business? What's the economy like? Is there a social movement driving shift in behaviour or buying tastes? Is there some form of timing issue? Some compelling event? Is there a shift in technology? Is there some form of Uberisation of their market place? AI, machine learning, quantum computing? Is there a shift in the legal and regulatory environment, which means that they have to comply or they will be vilified, they'll be fined, they could lose their job? And the environmental movement. Mark Carney, only a couple of days ago, stated that companies that do not have a good sustainability policy, will go bankrupt.

I can't remember the name of the VC but he recently invested a hundred million in Oxford and 400 million in MIT to look at research around values around AI, making sure that the AI doesn't get out of control. He will not invest in companies that do not have a strong sustainability philosophy. So again, if you can help solve any of those kind of problems for your prospective customer, suddenly you've become front and centre. You're not one of these empty suits that turns up and just spews product information and crows about how great they are.

Steve:                  Absolutely. What you're espousing is having a different message for every person you approach. People don't want that. They want the magic bullet. They want the value proposition that they can send to a thousand people and five people will bite. Unfortunately, that's not a particularly good way of working.

Marcus:               This raises two or three really important questions. What I see too often is, people want to be rock stars. They want the fame and fortune but they don't want to put the graft in. The Beatles became overnight successes after seven years in a dingy cellar in Hamburg playing 12 hours a day, seven days a week. They learned their craft. I don't think there is enough emphasis on doing the basics well consistently. That brings me to my next major bugbear, which is the lack of executive training for new sales managers and ongoing training for sales managers, who get less than five percent of the training budget invested in sales people. As a result, they don't understand that their job is to hire the best people and get the best out of them. Make sure they have the resources they need in order to do their best work and protect them from their idiot bosses.

Marcus:               Now, the challenge here is that very few managers on-board effectively. Very few recruit effectively. They recruit reactively, then they fail to on-board and so an A player becomes a B or a C player by dint of being stuck with all of the average performers in the business for weeks or months on end. They don't set them up to succeed. Then there is no coaching. As a result of that, the sales people only learn by failing miserably and if they're smart enough to capture those lessons or get help independently. This is really where I'd like to take the conversation next. In terms of coaching sales people and managers on how to understand the business environment and develop some business acumen, what are your bits of advice around that in order to help people perform better when selling to the C-suite?

Steve:                  That's an excellent question. I mean, people talk about product knowledge. You need to know your product but much more important than that, you need to understand the business of the people you're selling to. I was about to say what keeps them awake at night. That's a terrible thing to say. That's one of the worst questions you can possibly ask. You should know that. You need to understand the ins and outs of their business and make intelligent assumptions.

When you're going to speak to someone, you need to be able to say, do you have this, that and the other problem? I once went into the head office of Pearson in Upper Saddle River in New Jersey and spent the entire day talking to the Head of Latin America. All we talked about was publishing. I talked about it in the context of my software, but it was about how returns works, how new title releases work. Do you have an issue where this, this and this happens? Well this is how we handle that.

What about this happening? If you don't understand their business then how can you give them any value? I think, to answer your question, I think we need to first of all realize that people need to understand their client's business and need to be able to talk to them on their level about their issues. I remember when I worked for Unisys, before I got into sales, I was in charge of professional services in the finance division. They brought in one of the big consulting companies to give us a two week course on how banking worked. That was immensely valuable because we could understand it from the banker's perspective. I think that it ties in with understanding your market, understanding your ideal customer. The question then is, "Okay, how does the ideal customer's business work and what are the gaps and the problems that you can help fill or solve?" If you say to someone, "We can do A, B and C," well, big deal. But if you describe a situation to someone, "Look have you had a situation..."

I'll use one I know from publishing. "Do you have a situation where you send books out to Woolworths," Big W as it's called here, "And they return books that aren't even yours and then make a claim for it? Then you've got to go through all the process of bringing them back into the warehouse and crediting them and then arguing about the credit and reconciling?" And they'll say, "Yeah, that's a terrible problem." I'll say, "Well we've got a particular solution for that, now let's look at, did you have this problem?" If you can describe their pain to them, you're empathizing and they think, "God this guy knows my stuff." Not knows his stuff, knows my stuff.

Marcus:               So that then brings me to the million dollar question. What does the C-suite want from a sales person?

Steve:                  They want someone that they can talk to on their level, that understands their issues from their perspective and that can help them come up with effective solutions that will solve something that they care about and that's a priority for them. Because every C level executive, whoever it is, the CEO or the CIO, hasn't got one problem. They've got a 1,000 problems. But they can only focus on a relatively small number at any one time. So the question is, which of my priorities can you help me with?

At some stage they'll want you to tell them how you do what you do because eventually they're going to get to the stage where they're convinced that yes, potentially you can help them. They want proof. But you don't start with proof. You start answering the first question people want to know is, "Why should I waste half an hour of my valuable time talking to you when eight million other people want that same half hour?"

If you can answer that then the next question is, "Okay, what's in it for me? What can you do for me that I want?" Then when they finally start to think, "Okay, maybe this person can do something," the next question is, "Okay, are they bullshitting me? Can they really do it?" That's when they want proof. But that's the order. You don't start off with white papers and case studies, you start off with talking to them about, "I know you've got this issue. I'm going to describe the pain you get from this issue and I'm going to say to you, I can help you with this issue. Shall we keep talking?"

Marcus:               This is so key because I think one of the worst myths that's peddled in the general sales arena is that you have to have a strong elevator pitch. The elevator pitch is all selfish. It's talking about you, your company, your products, your services. Your 30 second commercial needs to enter in to their world. The analogy I use is, there's a scene in the film Finding Nemo where they're swimming along and suddenly they hit the gulf stream. When they do, whoosh, off they go. It's our job as sales people, as sales professionals, let's put it that way, to enter into the conversations they are already having. The stuff that gives them bile, causes them an ulcer, that causes them to worry, to sit in fear, to think, "God what am I going to do? This is a problem that's keeping me, not only awake at night but it's potentially threatening my job, my reputation and it's the stuff that could mean that I have to lay off hundreds or thousands of people."

As a result of that, if you can enter into that conversation, suddenly you have their attention. Their attention is emotional. This is where the traditional selling methodologies go horribly wrong as well. Because as you say, they lead with logic and reason. They lead with the white papers and the proofs but that's not how people buy. That's not how the brain works. No matter how good you think you are, you are not going to override 300 million years of evolutionary hard wiring of how the brain goes about making decisions. You have to find the emotion. Then there has to be a trigger that causes the brain to say, "Okay, this is worth investigating. Let's go and find some evidence." If the evidence is compelling, then it justifies the emotional decision. Too often sales people miss this and marketing departments miss this.

Technology companies are atrocious at this. If you look at their websites, they're packed full of tedious technological detail, which is only of real interest to people too low down the food chain to be able to make a decision. They don't speak to the audience that they really need to speak to, which is the C-suite, because that's where power lies. That's where people can say, "You know, I want this, make it happen." Everybody else will march to their tune. So, why is it, after all these years, people still haven't got to grips with that simple fundamental fact of human nature?

Steve:                  Well you said it yourself a while back, the basics are important. What you've just described, to a degree, is the old advertising adage. AIDA. Attention, interest, design and action. Your elevator pitch, if there is... Well there is such a thing. Your elevator pitch is designed to get their attention. It's got to talk about them. Initially your objective, the action that you want, initially is to get them to listen more. If you've got 30 seconds, the only objective is to get them to want to know more. If you can talk about something that they care about then they want to know more. If they don't care about it then they don't. But you're not trying to sell them in that 30 seconds, you're just trying to get enough of their attention or get their attention to get enough interest for them to desire to hear more. That's the initial A in AIDA.

Because we know our own product so well, we live it, we breathe it, we know all the bits and bytes and how to overcome objections and all these old fashioned things, we can't understand how these stupid prospects are so idiotic they can't see how good it is for them. What we forget is, they don't know we exist. They don't care we exist. If they did know we exist, well there are a million other people that are ahead of us in the priority queue.

Marcus:               So those of you listening, pay heed to this rule. There are no bad prospects. There are only bad salespeople. Tied to that, you can never blame the prospect for doing something to you that you never said he could not do. As a result, what sales people tend to do is get bitter and twisted. Bear in mind, what you've just done when you've turned up and you've talked about your company and your product range and how wonderful you are and who your clients are, is the equivalent of a newborn father turning up with photographs of his ugly child and showing it to a total stranger and then expecting them to coo and be excited. If you turn up and show photos of your ugly baby to a C-suite executive, serves you right when you leave with their boot print on your buttocks.

Steve:                  Indeed.

Marcus:               That moves us very cleanly to, what do they not want from a sales person?

Steve:                  They don't want to be pitched. They don't want to be sold to. They don't want to be pressured. They don't want clever closeing or ‘alternate or’ questions, you know, do you want it in blue or yellow? They want someone that can talk to them intelligently about their business in their language.

Marcus:               One of my mentors is a chap called Dr. Mark Goulston and he wrote a fabulous book. He wrote two fabulous books actually. One called ‘Just Listen’ and the other called ‘Talking to Crazy’, highly recommended if you haven't read them. ‘Just Listen’ is a must read for anyone, if you're part of the human species you have to read it. Particularly if you're in sales or in management. In there he says that we all want to be heard, to feel felt and to be understood. I joke about this, being a lapsed catholic. I think one of the reasons why the catholic church has survived so long is confession. Because it's an opportunity to unburden. What I've noticed, as I've improved my own sales capability, the number of times CEOs say to me, "You know, I've never told anybody this. I've been in business with my partner for 18 years, he doesn't even know this is a concern of mine. I haven't even told my wife." Sales people who can create that kind of reaction from a prospect will be sought out because it's lonely, you're isolated. You feel exposed in a very senior position in organizations. What you're looking for is someone who understands you. Stephen Covey said, "Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

Steve:                  That's correct. When you are a sales director or a CEO it's very difficult to admit that to your peers or to your direct reports. You're seen as the one that's in charge and in control. Yes you do need to have someone that can do that but it's probably not going to be someone from within your own organization.

Marcus:               Again, another big influence of mine was Stephen Covey. I remember asking him a very mediocre question to which I got this spectacular, stellar response, which was, the greatest among us serves the most. That was a turning point for me. When I realized that my job was service. Not servitude, which is where most sales people end up, but service. It's actually focusing on the other person. Caring enough to focus totally on them, no distractions and paying full attention. My friend Ron [inaudible 00:32:47] came up with this wonderful maxim, which is, attention is a currency. You pay attention. The problem is that most sales people are fixated on listening for the silence so that they can fill it with the sound of their own voice. Rather than slowing down, absorbing what the prospect has said to them and then feeding off that response to ask another fantastic, insightful and often uncomfortable challenging question.

I believe a sales person's job is diagnosis. Prescription is the easy bit. You only prescribe when you've diagnosed the correct cause of their problem. What they do not want is somebody coming along and mind reading and making assumptions about what their problem is, without having first established what the real cause is. And, I've done a lot of work in media. One of the worst things I ever heard was the maxim, you're only ever three years from being fired by a client. What kind of stupid short term thinking is that? If you win an enterprise customer, you want to keep them for decades. They are your passport to early retirement and untold wealth but the only way that you can achieve that is by serving them. Making sure you are helping them meet their agenda, meet their objectives. Too often, in a sales meeting, the sales person doesn't really understand how to establish that agenda or the boundaries. What's the advice that you give to your clients right at the opening phases of a meeting with a C level executive to establish the ground rules, establish the agenda and establish the boundaries?

Steve:                  Well just picking up on what you said first, you talked about sales meetings and executive meetings, I'll say to my clients before I get to that stage, I'll say, "Okay what do you discuss in a sales meeting? Or an executive meeting? You discuss your prospects, your products, your customers, your pipeline, your leads. If you're in an executive meeting you talk about your suppliers, your shareholders." Then I'll say, "Okay, when you talk to a prospect that's what they think about. Theirs. Not yours. They don't care about any of this stuff that you talk about in sales meetings or executive meetings. They care about themselves." Because to me, two of the most important qualities in a sales person are empathy, being able to put yourself in the other person's perspective, and curiosity. When you ask a question, really wanting to know the answer and digging deep.

So that's what I tell them to start with. But when it comes to starting a meeting with a senior executive, the first question I ask is, "How did you get through the door? Why are they seeing you? They've agreed to see you for a reason. They must have some expectation."

Now I did some work a few years back with a very large software company that wanted some hot leads, or wanted some executive meetings. We got them in to see a number of financial institutions, credit unions and small banks here, on the basis of, "Hi we'd like to talk to you about how we can help you to sign more home loans." Because the credit unions were growing, they wanted to get more customers and this company, among other things, sold customer experience software, which helped you to do it automatically. So we got those meetings for them and we actually got someone to transcribe the meetings were on the phone so we could see how it went. It pretty much went, "Hi we're from a big American software company. We've got clients all over the world who aren't banks and aren't in Australia and we do all this and my job is to work in the mid market." There was nothing whatsoever about what got them the call in the first place, which was helping their customers to sign more home loans.

So I would say, look, find out what... First question is, sure you want to know what your objective is. For instance get another meeting. But what's their objective? Why have they agreed to see you? Then the next question I tell them they want to think about is, what intelligent question, what intelligent assumptions can you make based upon your research, where you can show you've put yourself into the customer's shoes. Yes, you can make assumptions. But they've got to be intelligent assumptions that you test. The other thing I say is, what stories can you tell that demonstrate that you understand what you're talking about, rather than just tell them, "Yeah we do this, that and the other." How can you, at the appropriate stage, bring stories in? And there's a number of other things but they're a few of the things I tell people. But the first thing I think of when you're meeting someone is, you set an agenda.

"Thanks for scheduling this meeting. The reason we've agreed to get together is to talk about how we can help you to do X, Y and Z. And what I'd like to do is I'd like to cover this, this and this, if this is okay with you and can I just start off by asking you a couple of questions?" Then the first question is, "Okay you have an issue with doing X," and then you explore that. The questions you ask depend upon the situation you're in. There's no set of standard, "What keeps you awake at night," or "What are your top three issues," questions because they just show you haven't done your research. But if you can say, "In your annual report you said that your key focus this year was on increasing customer satisfaction, can I ask you what are the top three things that you've tried to do to achieve that? Or what's the major obstacle that you're having that's stopping you doing that?" Then you're starting to open the conversation. Then you sit back and listen and you dig deep to really, really understand the question.

And you're not afraid to say, "I'm sorry but I didn't quite get that. Can you just explain that a different way?" Or, "When you say this do you mean that?" But there's no standard set of one, two, three questions you ask. It depends on the research that you do and on the situation you're in.

Marcus:               Again, couple of things come out of that. I do want to come back to the structure of the meeting but a couple of things. The first thing is, if you are going to take up the time and they are going to invest their time in you, when you are selling to them, bear in mind if you're dealing with a C level exec of a large multinational, their time, the contribution they are expected to make, is measured in the tens of thousands of dollars per hour. So you better be prepared. You need to go in with a clear plan. You also need to have rehearsed. Do not wing your meetings with C-suite executives. Don't wing your meetings with anybody. When you think about the amount of time and effort and resource it takes to get one lead to a meeting, it is a crashing waste. I think it's an act of gross misconduct to turn up to a meeting not having prepared and not having planned and not having rehearsed.

I advise my clients, and this will come as a shock to many of you, that for every hour they expect to be in front of the prospect, they need to put in three hours minimum rehearsal. Now, if you put that amount of time in, your conversion rate goes up. 83 percent of first meetings fail to turn into a second meeting. So it's all well and good getting meetings but what the hell are you doing wasting, squandering that opportunity through lack of preparation? The next thing is, do not work to a script. Have a framework so that you understand that you're moving from A to B to C to D. In Sandler we have the submarine. Bonding, upfront contract, pain, budget decision, second upfront contract, fulfillment, post sale and referrals.

So I know where we are at each moment in the sales cycle. I'm always moving forward. But I don't ever follow a script. I have a framework. So for example around pain discovery I'll look at the scope, the significance and the priority. I want to understand what caused them, at this point, to think about this problem and fixing it. I want to know how long it's been going on for and what caused them to take action now. I want to understand what made them aware of it and how long they'd been aware of it and how often it happens. At what point did it become a problem worth fixing? Too often, sales people lack that savvy to have that framework and to understand that you're taking the prospect through a journey of discovery. Because if they knew what the cause of their problem was, wouldn't they already have fixed it?

So it's our job to be great diagnosticians. I reiterate again, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. There is too much selling malpractice going on. That is why, waking your point from earlier Steve, CEOs are saying regularly, "The sales person brought no value. It was a waste of my time." That is a sin as far as I'm concerned.

Steve:                  What you said is very true as well, you put in a massive effort to get a meeting and then you just threw it away. It's like going through all of the qualifying stages of the European championships and then not turning up for the final.

Marcus:               Absolutely. Too often we forget, this is one of my bugbears, I hear people blather on about how important it is for them to like you and to build a relationship and so on. All of that can come later. What they need to do is trust you. They need to know that you have their best interests at heart and you're putting them front and centre. They have your full attention and that your intent is to help. It's not to selfishly see if you can turn them into an ATM machine from which you can extract cash. The revenue, the transaction, is a by-product of doing your job well in the first place, doing the right behaviours. Coming with the right intent. Making sure that you're fully prepared. Making sure you understood their situation and their marketplace, their environment, where they are in their role. So that when you target your questions you're actually bringing value and your questions should challenge them. They should deliver insight. They should help them raise their level of understanding. The number of times I've had CEOs and senior executives tell me, "You know I've never really seen it that way before. This is the first time I've really understood what my problem was."

Steve:                  What I really like is when I'm in with a client or a senior executive and I ask them a question and they go, "Oh, that's a good question." And they've got to think about. Then I know it hit home.

Marcus:               To take that a little bit further, I think where a lot of sales people go horribly wrong is they stop at the first response. I believe what we have to do is we have to keep cutting away, cutting away, cutting away until we get the root cause of their problem. You do not take the first response because it's always intellectual. The second response is always intellectual. The third one may be emotional but often you have to dig four, five, six, seven deep in order to get to that root cause. Tear the scales from their eyes so they suddenly realize the real problem. Often what we find is it's them. They have propagated a culture that tolerated certain behaviours or non-performance. They have been getting in the way because they were so wedded to their old way of doing things that they haven't seen the new reality creep up on them.

As a result we have to nurture them through that process because if we jar them into it, then what happens is we trigger their amygdala and they see us as the enemy and they either freeze, flee or fight us. It's our job to make sure that we do not allow that to happen. They need to see us as their ally, not their adversary and not their accomplice. We challenge them. If they tolerated stuff that is doing them harm, we have to raise it with them. Because too often, certainly in my world, in the sales training, I see sales leadership and executive leadership propagating terrible, terrible behaviours. You look at the big vendors of technology that grew up in the 80s and 90s and the early noughties, they stuck with their old business model. So SaaS and cloud and all of that has flummoxed them. Because they haven't changed their compensation scheme.

They haven't changed who and how they recruit. They haven't changed how they train and develop their people. So they're just waiting to be Ubered by somebody who's going to come along and is going to solve the current problem and do so in a way that people will want to buy. If you look at the way executives are buying now, particularly in tech, 80 percent of technology purchases will be made by the line of business in 2019, 2020. Now, 90 percent of that will come through partners, why? Because there is massive complexity. By 2026, Dartmouth's predicting 90 percent of technology purchases will be made through the channel not through the vendor. So if they're not adapting to that reality, then they're going to find themselves out on their ear because the level of complexity... Jay McBain was talking about, within 10 years there will be 35 million options around IT for executives to choose from.

No one vendor can possibly satisfy that so they're going to have to rely on their partners. The partners are the people who've got the long standing relationships. The partners are the ones who understand the business, who've spent years and years and years really getting to know the business and understanding the direction and the strategy. So too often, we're seeing executives trapped by what they've always done. What I'm really curious about is, again, how you're coaching your clients to help the C-suite recognize that while change is abhorrent to most people, Woodrow Wilson said, "If you want to make enemies, recommend change," that I believe fundamentally is all we ever sell. In fact, I've just read Keenan's book, ‘Gap Selling’. That was his point too. What we sell is change. No matter whether you're selling an ERP system or care for the elderly or, you know, redecorating the building.

It's change. By nature we don't like it. So how do you coach your clients to manage the conversation about change, which is invariably unwelcome?

Steve:                  It's a good question. You mentioned ERPs and of course an ERP isn't an impulse purchase. You know, apart from the fact it costs a lot of money when I used to sell them, it's a big disruption to the company for six months to two years. Everyone in the company is disrupted. It's a huge undertaking. You don't close a sale for an ERP by saying, "Would you like it in blue or pink?" Getting back to your question, first of all I have to get my clients to understand the situation from the customer's perspective. You have to ask questions that make them aware of the consequences of not changing. And you also, I think, need to make them aware of the genuine risks and how you mitigate those risks. Because any big project is going to involve risks. If you try and minimize those and say, "She’ll be right mate," as we say here, you lose credibility.

So I think you've got to look at the, where will you be in three years or five years time if you don't do something? What are the consequences of not doing something? And also, what are the consequences of doing the wrong thing? How can we work together to mitigate those consequences so that yes, you change, but you change in a managed, low risk way, with a partner that can help you along the way and that knows all the bumps and pitfalls?

Marcus:               This again raises another really interesting behavioural shift for sales people. We teach a rule which is, if there's a bomb waiting to blow, light the fuse yourself. You have to raise the objections. You have to raise the risks before the prospect does. Because if it happens in their mind then what will happen is they will run this catastrophising, full colour, full Dolby quadraphonic movie in their head. You have to raise the objections before they do. Because then it's at your time you're choosing and you can help them to neutralize their concern.

Steve:                  Absolutely.

Marcus:               If you don't do that they effectively what you're doing is you're pulling the pin on a grenade and swallowing it. That's where so often you hear, "Well you didn't tell me about that." "Well you didn't ask." It's incumbent on you. Mark Twain said it beautifully, "Always tell the truth. It surprises your friends and confounds your enemies." I think we should be startlingly disarmingly honest all the time with our prospects because the second we are caught in a lie, while they may forgive it, they'll never forget. What that means is they will never trust another word that comes out of your mouth. All we have as our currency is trust and influence. That's it. If we are not as good as our word, if we are not 100 percent trustworthy as a vendor then why would they buy from us? They will find a way to replace us and they'll find a way to get even because that's human nature.

Once bitten, twice shy. So it's our responsibility to be their ally. To be a genuine partner when we're selling to them. Partnership is about helping each other get better. One of the other things that we always teach and I'm pretty sure you will as well is that you have regular quarterly value reviews with your customer where they know how they're going to hold you accountable and how you're going to hold them accountable so that you're always moving forward. You need to understand what value they want out of your relationship and how they're going to measure that. Then you need to make sure that they're holding your feet to the fire so that you're getting better and better. That's how you keep accounts.

This is again, another crashing waste. There is no point winning an account only to let it dash out of the back door because of lack of attention to detail and lack of vulnerability. Lack of inviting them to criticize you so that you can improve. Your thoughts?

Steve:                  I agree with you 100 percent but that's not the normal paradigm of sales. The normal paradigm of sales with a lot of people is, get in there, get as much as you can out of the customer as possible on the first sale and then move on. I think what you're saying is totally correct but I think that the number of people that actually practice that are less than the number of people that don't practice that, shall we say?

Marcus:               I think it's fewer than two percent.

Steve:                  I mentioned the fact that the company I worked for when I sold ERP got acquired by another company. I taught their US team how to sell our book publishing software. They did very well. They sold, I think seven or eight new sites in the first year. We had many modules. We had the base, the core modules and we had specific modules like royalties and subscriptions and book production, which were part of the package but which people didn't necessarily need immediately. So when someone said to me, "Look you know, that's more than our budget," I would say, "That's no problem. Why don't you buy the core modules first and then in a year's time when you've implemented them we can come back and we can address the rest." That got within the budget, enabled us to prove everything works. In a year's time and two years time I would go back and I would sell them the additional modules. Worked perfectly.

But what the guys in the States did, they would say, "Okay, well I'll tell you what we'll do, we'll throw in all of the modules. That comes to $800,000. We'll discount them by half. We'll give you them for 400,000." They'd win the deals that way, very quickly. But because there was no more money to be got out of the customer they lost interest. So there was no incentive for them to look after the customer and they had a model whereby you paid an annual subscription to use the software whether you liked to or not. So you were screwed. So their model was get customers in quickly, do it cheap and then charge them 15 percent a year for as long as you could keep them. You would keep them because it was too expensive for them to move to someone else.

That's one of the reasons I left. I couldn't work under that model. In fact, in the last big sale I did, which was a sale in Europe for across five countries, I refused to sign it on that company's paper. I said, "No, this has been my customer for 10 years, they won't sign your contract with those conditions. We have to use our old contract," which made the annual maintenance voluntary. Because I didn't want to lock them in to having to pay for the rest of their life for something they weren't getting value for. It probably wasn't very good of me from my company's perspective but it eased my conscience from my customer's perspective.

Marcus:               Again, this comes back to that whole piece around service. You mentioned this tendency to discount in order to buy the business. I think that is crazy. Discounting is one of the reasons why I think you should probably consider firing a large chunk of your sales force because many of them are no better than an empty chair when you consider how much of your profit they're giving away. It sends a terrible message for the future because if you've started by discounting by 50 percent, the next thought going through their mind is, "Well what next? What else can we squeeze?" As a result of that, every conversation is prefaced by, "Okay so give me your best price." People do not buy on price. In a real selling situation price is never the issue. Money is never the issue.

If you can solve their problem, can demonstrate value, yes they may not have the budget for all of it so don't give them all of it yet. Work on the basis that there is a program over which they will buy more and more and each time you touch them there should be value brought. Not saving money in order to drive the procurement team's bonus. Which is again, one of the big challenges because I think as a profession, we as sales people have allowed procurement to take control in these large enterprise deals. As a result of that we spend all of our lives on our back foot. It shouldn't be that way. In fact, there's no reason to. You should always be selling at rate card and at premium and if you do offer any form of discount you should be getting something of equal or greater value back in return.

You shouldn't be making unilateral discounts because I think that sends the message to the C-suite that there is something wrong. You're needy and desperate and that creates doubt in their mind. What they're looking for is leadership and a safe pair of hands from their sales people. They're not looking for someone who'll just buy the business at any price. That's crazy.

Steve:                  I agree although I mean, there are some cultures where that is very much the accepted way. Certainly in China, everyone in China quotes their software and hardware at five times the retail price so they can give 80 percent discounts. So there is a degree of culture in that. In general, I do agree with you. People would always ask for a discount and we basically gave them a discount upfront because what we would do is this. The object code would cost a million dollars and when I took over I said, "Okay well let's sell them the source code for 25 percent of that, 20 percent of that or 25 percent and then we'll offer them a discount, so we'll basically give them the source code for free." That way, when they came, we would say, "Okay the price is a million dollars. Source code is 250,000 but we'll discount that by 20 percent. It's a million dollars." They'd come back and say, "Can we have another discount?" I'd say "No, we've already given you one." That was a bit sneaky. But again, that was in an era where every software vendor used to give fairly big discounts.

Marcus:               Well I'll challenge that. In my view, the minute you offer a discount unilaterally, I believe you've told your prospect, "I lied about my price. I lied about the value." My view is that we should be planting our feet and the first thing we do is we say no, at least three times to any request for a discount. Because in my experience most of them are trying it on. If you've done a good enough job in the diagnostic phase and you've built the value through their pain by numbers and you've worked out what it's costing them to stay stuck, then most of them will stop asking for a discount when they realize that you're not going to move. If you do after the third no, decide that you're going to move, then have them offer a concession first. The concession can be, introductions to other part of their business, that they'll provide a written and video testimonial.

They will act as a reference or you will get first bite of the next cherry. Again, always make sure you get something of equal or greater value back in return. I take onboard what you're saying about cultural drivers but again I've taught people to sell in China and in India where discounting is part of the culture. The Middle East. In my experience, you can sell past that if you've built up enough value. Now, sometimes, you need to give them a win to help them feel like they've saved face. In that case, it's okay to give that discount. But again, what you're doing is you're getting an IOU marker so that, "Look if I give you this today, then what I'm looking for back is this in return." That way you end up on a level playing field. Otherwise you start behaving like a commodity provider and I think that is the kiss of death.

Steve:                  I would agree with the latter. I mean I think times are changing. I agree that certainly you should never give something without asking for something. I had a client a couple of weeks back. The company... He was dealing with two different divisions of a large company. One was in Toronto, one was here in Australia. The one in Toronto, he offered a price of, I think it was $38,000 a month. They came back and they said, "No you're too dear we can't afford that." He was only small, he needed the business. But I was proud of him because he actually said, "Okay well look, I'll tell you what I can do, I can give you it for 30... This is per month, for 35,900 per month, but it's got to be over eight years not five years." He didn't give away too much and he asked for something in return.

So he did well there. But then he got another email from the other division here in Australia that basically said, "Your price is $1.5 million over five years. Our budget's $750,000. If you don't respond within a day then we'll assume you're not interested." They sent it to a couple of people. He was concerned about losing the business then, I said, "Look it's your company. You've got to make a decision. I think that they're trying it on. I think they're bluffing. I would go back and I would say, this is what we can do but you need to do something differently. You need to do something for us as well." I think they said, I think it was $750,000 over eight years. I said, "Look, go back to them and say, we can do 750 but over four years." So I agree with you. Basically, you can't just hand over money. Especially once someone says, "That's too much," but they want you to make the counter offer.

Marcus:               One of the guys that I trained closed a small piece of consultancy, a taster session for a full brand, earlier last week. His opening question was, "Again, to come back to why am I here, have you already decided you want to work with me and this meeting's to get the details? Or are you undecided and need convincing today?" The CEO said, "Very good question, can I answer a different one?" He said, "Fine but we'll come back to mine." He said, "It's yours to lose." His response, and this is the point, "You can't lose what you never had." The CEO laughed, "I like you, we'll work together." That was the deal done. Then it was a matter of making sure that they worked out what the details were and it was confirming the order. This is a rule that I want everybody to take away, you cannot lose what you never had.

The problem is, this mentality of losing a sale is down to your mental attachment to the outcome. You made the point that the guy needed the business. If you want it but don't need it, you control the sale. If you need it, the prospect controls the sale. On that final note, my one word of advice here is this. You prospect for choice. If you have a pipeline that is brimming, three to five to 12 times more than you require in order to hit your quota, then you do not ever need any one piece of business. So get out there and prospect.

Steve:                  Absolutely.

Marcus:               Thank you. Steve. We've come to the top of the hour. Couple of questions. What are you reading? What blogs are you following? What books are you reading? What podcasts are you listening to that you'd recommend to the listeners?

Steve:                  Okay. Well I mean recently I've read several good books. ‘Never Split the Difference’ by Christopher Voss is a very good book on negotiation. And also a good entertaining read. You probably know, he was the lead FBI hostage negotiator and it's quite challenge to split the difference when you're talking about a hostage.

Marcus:               You can keep a leg.

Steve:                  That's right. He said, basically, what you've said that it's all about making an emotional connection. The people holding hostages want to be listened to.

I always get this title wrong, ‘Pre-Suasion’ by Robert Cialdini. I always loved 'Influence' and I think his book ‘Pre-Suasion’ is excellent. And a book by a friend of mine here in Australia that makes very, very good books, ‘Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell’ by Mike Adams.

Marcus:               In fact I interviewed Mike Adams about six months ago. Great interview.

Steve:                  You'd know him. I listen to a lot podcasts. I'm connected with a lot of great people. Tony Hughes, I was chatting to him this morning. He always puts out interesting stuff. Although a very large volume, it's hard to keep up sometimes.

Marcus:               He was my guest about three weeks ago.

Steve:                  Okay. You're stealing all my thunder. I've just read today a pretty good article on using your voice, by Dennis Champagne.

Marcus:               Dennis Champagne as in the drink?

Steve:                  That's right yeah. And Mario Martinez and his colleagues at Vengreso put out some interesting things and some great podcasts.

Marcus:               I'm interviewing Mario in a couple of days. This is great.

Steve:                  And there's plenty more but I do most of my discovery of these things through LinkedIn and I read a lot of articles, blogs and I agree with... I learn from a lot of them and I disagree with a reasonable amount of them. I think there's a lot of focus these days on technology for technology's sake. Everyone wants a magic bullet and magic bullets are great but you still need to do the basics.

Marcus:               Thank God. One of my big bugbears is the amount of money that's being spent on sales enablement when you haven't got sales people who can sell. All that technology is fabulous but only if you have sales people who have the capacity to make use of it. All of our sales enablement investment is wasted if a sales person cannot use the phone, cannot ask good questions, doesn't know how to listen, doesn't know how to plan, doesn't know how to get access to the C-suite. So, I'm on a mission. Stop wasting your money on that at the moment. Spend it on getting great sales people, training them and on-boarding them well, getting the best out of them and then invest in that technology so that you can supercharge your sales. Couple of great books,’ Stop Selling and Start Leading’ by Deb Calvert and her latest book, ‘Discover Questions’. Keenan's book,’ Gap Selling’ is really worth a read. Mike Weinberg's ‘Sales Truth’.

Steve:                  Mike's a good guy.

Marcus:               Yeah. Speaks a lot of sense. Also ‘Selling from the Heart’ by Larry Levine.

Steve:                  I know Larry.

Marcus:               I interviewed him last week. Fabulous. Just a joy to speak to. Final question then, if you had a golden ticket and you could go back and advise the idiot 23 year old Steve, what would you advise him based on your years of experience and wisdom.

Steve:                  Well two things, first of all, if you're going to take drugs, drink beer and chase women, don't do it in that order. Secondly, I’d say get a passion earlier. I was passionate about football and I was passionate about having fun but I think if you can make your passion something that you do for a living as well then you've got a... It took me a long time to become passionate about the work I did. I was always competent. I always did a really good job but I never really got passionate about it until quite late in my career.

Marcus:               Okay that's really good advice. I agree. I think finding my obsession with understanding people early has been a major boon for me. One of the things that Sandler taught us is that once you understand how to sell, spend all of your time learning about people. It's a fantastic bit of advice. Learn about microexpressions from Paul Ekman's work. Learn about behavioural economics from the likes of Daniel Kahneman. Learn about persuasion from Cialdini and really invest in yourself. Put at least one hour a day of study in every single day. While it feels like a bit of a chore, it will pay dividends over the years. I mean, over the last five years, I have listened to or read well over 700 books and what I noticed from that is the difference in terms of my perception, my understanding, the insight that I have is exponentially greater than it was five years ago. That's literally an hour a day, every day, without fail.

Steve:                  We never stop learning.

Marcus:               Absolutely. One of my favourite proverbs is, “if you're green you grow, if you're ripe you rot”. The problem is that too often people leave school and they become functionally illiterate. They stop reading or all they do is read the sports pages. They don't feed their mind. You've got to feed your mind. Steve, thank you so much. This has been a really interesting and exciting conversation. I look forward to doing it again in the future. How can people get hold of you?

Steve:                  LinkedIn. If you look for SteveHallSydney, that's my hashtag and it's also my LinkedIn ID. All of my contact details are there.

Marcus:               Okay. Thank you again Steve Hall.

Steve:                  My pleasure.

Marcus:               I'm Marcus Cauchi, signing off from The Inquisitor podcast. If you'd like to get in touch please email me at Marcus.cauchi that's C-A-U-C-H-I @Sandler.com. You can phone me if you're in the UK on my mobile, 07515 937221. Two requests, if there is someone you would like me to interview for the podcast, then please ping me an email, again [email protected]. Tell me who it is you'd like me to interview and why. If you'd be a good guest on the podcast, do volunteer. I love talking to interesting and challenging people. If you've got something to say that's going to be a challenge, that's going to be controversial and uncomfortable for the audience to listen to, even better. That's Marcus Cauchi from The Inquisitor podcast signing off. Happy selling and good luck.

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Hope you found that as fascinating as I did, at the time and when I listened to it again. So many invaluable ideas and recommendations from Marcus.

If you sell to senior executives, if you are a senior executive or if you help people who sell to senior executives please feel free to join my LinkedIn group, Executive Sales Coaching.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/7049883

#SellingAtCLevel #stevehallsydney